transformation

[schlomo]

Transformation

While I was enjoying watching and listening to a spirited rendition of Verdi’s Requiem included in my subscription to the Met on Demand, I remembered the first time I had encountered that requiem. As a teenager, I loved symphonies but despised opera and other types of choral works. But my father, an aficionado of all forms of classical music, one day at his friend’s house tried to introduce me to Verdi’s Requiem. He put me in a back room, started the record player, locked the door, and left me without saying an encouraging word. I valiantly sought to find some merit in the Requiem, but I had a visceral distaste for the recording from the redundant beginning until the anti-climactic ending. Of course, being trapped in that room added to my anxiety. Although I wanted to please my father after he unlocked the door, all I could do is crack my knuckles and bitterly sigh. He had miserably failed to achieve his goal. I hated Verdi’s Requiem with a passion.

Go figure! As an adult, I passionately adored the once-intolerable requiem: it touched my soul, whether the music was fierce or poignant. My fondness for Verdi’s masterpiece was even more pronounced when my mother asked me to play her favorite semi-sweet, eloquent soprano duo sung right after the Day of Judgment section. I tearfully fulfilled her wish a few years later.

Many people feel that our opinions are at an early age indelibly etched into our character traits as we grow old. That may be true, but I am grateful that my musical sensibilities so radically changed in regards to Verdi’s Requiem. Unlike my mother, however, I want a recording of the cataclysmic Rex Tremendae in Berlioz’s Requiem to be played at my funeral.